Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2013 5:26 pm Post subject: Which version of MythTV are people running?

I started running MythTV from portage, then it seemed like portage got quite out-of-date for a long time. I went out-of-tree for a while to get 0.24.2, then some time last year went back to portage when it caught up, and am now running 0.25.2. But I see now that there is 0.25.3 available, as well as several builds of 0.26.

Can anyone comment on the relative stability and add-on availability of these various releases?_________________.sigs waste space and bandwidth

It works mostly OK... haven't had it crash "segfault" as often as previous versions but sometimes it hangs, not sure if it's due to waiting on the backend or not...

I'd say a lot of the crashes I had were due to problems with XvMC and related acceleration. Now I'm pretty much just burning CPU power to not crash..._________________Intel Core i7 2700K@ 4.1GHz/HD3000 graphics/8GB DDR3/180GB SSDWhat am I supposed watching?

IMHO the whole MythTV project is kind of chaotic. Additionally, according to one of devs the development is currently stalled. It is usable as a PVR, I believe. Don't expect much if you also want to use it for liveTV. I'm using 0.26.0_p20130207. I have to use a cronjob to kill mythlogserver 24 times a day, otherwise it will run away and create multiple zombie instances that will eat your resources. For liveTV my PVR-2250 kind of works for analog (although I'm having issues starting it), my pcHDTV-5500 simply does not work. You may have better luck if you are using HDHomeRun, lots of devs seem to be using it._________________Please learn how to denote units correctly!

I'm using a CX23885 chipset board with HDTV ATSC tuner (Hauppauge, and ATSC/Digital since they don't broadcast in analog anymore around here). It seems to work OK for both PVR and LiveTV with 0.25.3 (20130101) but has crashed a lot in the past. Only serious problem I had with 0.25.3 is that it desyncs with pulling off the air electronic program guides so it stops receiving them, and needs a backend restart to get it working again. It happens fairly consistently so it makes PVR operation annoying (it won't record anything if it doesn't get EPG data) and couldn't fix it... I hope 0.26 fixes it._________________Intel Core i7 2700K@ 4.1GHz/HD3000 graphics/8GB DDR3/180GB SSDWhat am I supposed watching?

Based on what I've read hear, I'm guessing that I will pull the trigger on 0.25.3 this weekend. I currently have a daily cron job that does a database backup and "optimize", so I suspect I'll just plain restart mythbackend in that same job. Thanks for the warning on this one.

I started using mythtv back around 0.18 or so, with an el-cheapo bt848 card. Some time later I picked up a pair of hvr-1600s, planning ahead for the move to digital. I was on the driver list and assisted with the development, mostly getting bugfixes, but also reporting my findings, for both analog and digital sides of the card. I never did actually put the ATSC/QAM side into "production" before Comcast did their digital conversion in my area. At that point I picked up an HD HomeRun Prime and got a CableCard from Comcast, and have been running that way since._________________.sigs waste space and bandwidth

Currently running version 0.25.3_p20130101 at the moment, at the moment I cannot upgrade to 0.25.3_p20130131 since mythplugins is missing an ebuild for that version.

Unfortunately version 0.26 upwards has a very bad bug where lossless MPEG2 cutting simply doesn't work at all. That's an essential feature when making DVDs of recordings for other people._________________If ~amd64 ebuilds are cutting edge, then git-9999 ebuilds are chainsaws.
"Not everyone can ride a unicycle, does that mean we should put another wheel on it?" - Lokheed

I just upgraded to 0.26.0_p20130207 about a week ago. Running good. But I haven't done much with it beside record and playback. Haven't done any transcoding, so can't comment on that bug.

The only issue I'm running into personally is that mythweb doesn't support the new shared/streaming video library. So can't access those via the web, but that's ok with me.

I did enable the Airplay server, works great over wifi with my Macbook Air. Was able to play both audio and video streams from laptop iTunes directly to a frontend only machine. It does not support Airplay Mirroring though, so don't get those confused.

EDIT: I don't seem to have the problems that Jaglover is having. Myth logging server runs fine on all my machines. My backend has a PVR150 and a pcHDTV 5500 and both are working great recording analog and digital HD.

Currently running version 0.25.3_p20130101 at the moment, at the moment I cannot upgrade to 0.25.3_p20130131 since mythplugins is missing an ebuild for that version.

I looked this past weekend, and noticed that I'm in the same position. Then I noticed that I don't have any of the plugin USE flags enabled, and I don't think I'm actually using any of them. I have this funny feeling that I can just uninstall mythplugins and run the 20130131 release._________________.sigs waste space and bandwidth

I just upgraded to 0.26.0_p20130207 about a week ago. Running good. But I haven't done much with it beside record and playback. Haven't done any transcoding, so can't comment on that bug.

The only issue I'm running into personally is that mythweb doesn't support the new shared/streaming video library. So can't access those via the web, but that's ok with me.

I did enable the Airplay server, works great over wifi with my Macbook Air. Was able to play both audio and video streams from laptop iTunes directly to a frontend only machine. It does not support Airplay Mirroring though, so don't get those confused.

EDIT: I don't seem to have the problems that Jaglover is having. Myth logging server runs fine on all my machines. My backend has a PVR150 and a pcHDTV 5500 and both are working great recording analog and digital HD.

I was up on the Myth site, and saw something about needing to manually add a timezone table to the MySQL database, prior to starting the upgraded mythbackend. They also seemed just a bit vague on the directions on how to do it. Of course that may have changed since their stuff was written.

Can you comment on the upgrade process itself, getting to 0.26?_________________.sigs waste space and bandwidth

I was up on the Myth site, and saw something about needing to manually add a timezone table to the MySQL database, prior to starting the upgraded mythbackend. They also seemed just a bit vague on the directions on how to do it. Of course that may have changed since their stuff was written.

You know, I already had the tables, so I didn't have to do anything. I also started using MythTV way back in the 0.6 days in 2001-2002 I think, and my server is actually the very same machine, an old Dell desktop P4 2.4GHz with 768MB ram. But I'm not sure how or when I got the timezone tables. I think I might have done it during the crazy upgrade during the move from 0.21 to 0.22, or maybe with a mysql upgrade somewhere along the way.

It seems like a straight forward process though, run one command line. Just make sure you backup your DB first. And I would do all of this before even upgrading to 0.26. These tables won't hurt 0.25. So get 0.25 running correctly with those tables, backup and then upgrade to 0.26.

thanks for your remark about pcHDTV digital, maybe it's my kernel that is missing a driver after all upgrades. Will dig deeper into it. Also I experimented with LTO in this box, maybe wasn't the best idea._________________Please learn how to denote units correctly!

I just move up to 0.26 about a week ago...piece of cake. I'm running a Hauppaugge PVR USB2 and it works like a charm. 0.26 has been very stable for me so far. The Time zones table conversion was a snap.

Glad you are not suffering from dreaded mythlogserver issue. Even now (watching liveTV), looking at backend top output I can see mythbackend consuming 3.9% of CPU and mythlogserver taking 8.3%. This is just with one instance running. But I have seen load average over 37 !! in top with lots of instances of mythlogserver._________________Please learn how to denote units correctly!

That's really weird...my mythlogserver constantly sits at around 1%, while my mythbackend is taking about the same. I also only have one instance of mythlogserver. Configuration issue maybe? Is your mythlogserver logging a ton of stuff?

I just upgraded my box to 0.26 and got bit by the timezone problem. I thought it was automatic :D Nevertheless it was painless to add the table to mysql. (I suspect we need to do this again if tzdata is updated?)

Anyway the EPG problem reared its ugly head again and lost all the program guide info when I checked just before upgrading. After upgrading I hope the EPG continues to update. It was pretty much exactly a month before it starts giving up on EPG. I hope this timezone stuff helps, it was also something that happened since the last time I checked on mythtv...

Mythlogserver does eat some CPU (around 1%) for me, though I'm running on a Core2 Duo. The backend is taking less while idle. The frontend is not connected during this time.

*MORE DATA*

It looks like mythtv, probably mythlogserver, is logging issues with my DVB card not being able to get signal strength for some reason, and is dumping a log entry every 2 seconds. This probably could account for CPU usage especially if there's a lot of errors being spewed out?

I've had a few out of memory dumps with mythbackend 0.26.0_p20130207 over past few weeks. So I just upgraded to p_20130322.

My machine only has 768MB of ram. But I'm not running anything besides mysql and mythbackend on this machine. No X, nothing else. And since I've never had any out of memory errors before over the last 10 years, I'm assuming its gotta be something with mythbackend or the new mythlogserver. We'll see.

I saw in this weekend's update runs that mythtv-0.25.3 has been masked and is set for removal in 30 days. I guess I have to upgrade, soon.

1 - What should I upgrade to? There are a lot of mythtv-0.26 levels, but I've heard of problems with the log daemon. Has that been fixed, or did they give up on it for 0.27? Is running without the log daemon OK for a long-term fix?

2 - There are now a few mythtv-0.27 ebuilds available. Is this stuff good / stable enough for general use?

3 - Does anyone have mythweb running with either of these? I had mythweb running back at 0.24, lost it with 0.25, and haven't put any energy into it since. But Comcast has changed their chanel lineup a bit, and it's time to either delete / re-add my sources and tuners, or use the channel editor, and FWIU mythweb is the only usable channel editor. (I'm getting mis-selected channels when I try to record "new" channels.)

4 - Does mythtv better support the HD HomeRun Prime now? I had to jump through some hoops to configure it under 0.24, especially the third tuner.

5 - Does either 0.26 or 0.27 edit commercials better than 0.25.x? Something took a real step backward in the 0.25 series, and it's almost unusable for commercial editing._________________.sigs waste space and bandwidth

Before I update mythtv I have to catch up on gentoo updates in general on my mythtv systems. In addition to being masked, the distribution files for those ebuilds are no longer out there. If I end up needing to recompile mythtv (and I don't think I'll have to), assuming I still have all the files under /usr/portage/distfiles, which I do, will I be able to do that simply by unmasking the ebuilds? I really don't want to end up having to upgrade myth before I'm ready.

I'm not clear on whether to go with 0.26 or .027 either. I've been dreading mythlogserver from everything I've been hearing.

I'm also beside myself that, in 0.27, they did away with the Channel Record option (record any time on this channel) and forced the use of a filter for this. I'm in between New York and Philly and can get broadcasts from both areas by turning my antenna, but I watch the New York stations almost exclusively. For that reason, I have all the Philly network channels configured in case I want to turn my antenna to watch an NFL game for example. As a result, I use channel record for everything, otherwise it would try to record off a channel that will never come in...ffs.

For that reason I'm inclined to go with 0.26 for now, but I'm totally unclear on the logging stuff. When you refer to the "log daemon" I assume you're referring to mythlogserver(??). Is that really something that can be disabled? If so, do you get any logging at all?

Basically, they say you shouldn't have any issues with mythlogserver if it is configured properly. Meaning it is configured to log into syslog or in case of separate log dir it has proper permissions set. For myself I find rm /usr/bin/mythlogserver works just fine._________________Please learn how to denote units correctly!

Basically, they say you shouldn't have any issues with mythlogserver if it is configured properly. Meaning it is configured to log into syslog or in case of separate log dir it has proper permissions set. For myself I find rm /usr/bin/mythlogserver works just fine.

Actually I got a reply on mythtv-users mailing list on this one saying that in 0.27 the default behavior is to not use mythlogserver at all, and the individual processes write the logs themselves. I'm still waiting for clarification on that however. The official wiki certainly doesn't read that way:

...seems to confirm what I heard on the maiming list, although it doesn't sound like that's the default behavior without the --nologserver command line option or the --disable-mythlogserver build option.

Tom

Last edited by tld on Wed Dec 04, 2013 10:40 pm; edited 1 time in total

That's odd...have you tried the --nologserver command line option (I'm assuming you'd just need to add it to MYTHBACKEND_OPTS in /etc/conf.d/mythbackend)? I just had a user on the mailing list confirm that that should work.

At any rate, assuming that's correct, that's enough for me to go to 0.27 directly.